Once I was home, I phoned Saul to suggest how we might proceed with the interview, if he was still interested in my idea. I would reread the books (some, like “The Adventures of Augie March” and “Herzog,” for the third or fourth time), then send him my thoughts on each, structured as questions, for him to respond to at length however he liked. As it turned out, we never got much beyond a beginning, despite Saul’s willingness and my prodding. Every few months, in response to a letter or a phone call from me, some pages would arrive in the mail or through the fax machine, but then months would pass without a word from him, and, despite a weeklong visit I made to his Boston home one December, when he and I sat together for several hours every day talking about the books in the hope of stimulating his memory and his interest, the project petered out, and, reluctantly, I let him be. In time, I enlarged my “thoughts” into an essay on his work, and filed away the pages that Saul had sent sporadically in the course of the two and a half years that I’d tried to keep the interview alive.
Only recently have I taken the pages out to reread. They appear here as he wrote them, without any editorial correction or alteration—his sentences like his memories left to stand as they are—and with bracketed material added by me only for the sake of clarity. They focus on the early books “Augie March,” “Seize the Day,” and “Henderson the Rain King,” published between 1953 and 1959. We got no further than that. Most of the pieces are about “Augie” or are recollections—of Saul’s Chicago childhood or of Paris in 1948, where the book was begun—motivated by his thinking about “Augie”; sometimes it appears that he has forgotten having already answered my questions about “Augie,” and zestfully, with great precision, begins to develop a new line of thought that repeats details and incorporates motifs from a previous response. The pages about “Seize the Day” arrived in May of 2000 and those on “Henderson the Rain King” several months later, and that was the end of it.
It’s too bad that I couldn’t get him to go on to “Herzog,” “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” “Humboldt’s Gift,” and “The Dean’s December,” as I planned to do, but he just wasn’t interested enough in contemplating his own achievement anymore. Also, he was writing “Ravelstein” at the time, and the energy and concentration weren’t there for this sort of retrospective pursuit. It’s too bad, because what he wrote about the fifties books constitutes a singularly Bellowesque mix of mind and memory, the opening of an aged writer’s autobiography, unplanned, extemporized, and yet comparable in its vividness and evocative charm to Hemingway’s farewell to the world, the posthumously published memoir “A Moveable Feast.”
—Philip Roth
Icertainly was transformed [by writing “Augie March”] and I’ll probably be the last to understand how this happened, but I am very willing to look for the cause. I had written two very correct books [“Dangling Man” and “The Victim”] and I shall try to explain what I mean by correct: I seem to have felt that I, as the child of Russian Jews, must establish my authority, my credentials, my fitness to write books in English. Somewhere in my Jewish and immigrant blood there were conspicuous traces of a doubt as to whether I had the right to practice the writer’s trade. Perhaps I felt that I was a pretender or an outlaw successor. After all, it wasn’t Fielding, it wasn’t Herman Melville who forbade me to write, it was our own Wasp establishment, represented mainly by Harvard-trained professors. I must say that these guys infuriated more than they intimidated me.
Well, I got a Guggenheim, thanks to Jim Farrell [James T. Farrell, the author of “Studs Lonigan”] and Edmund Wilson, and with wife and child I crossed the Atlantic on a ship named De Grasse carrying about a hundred Southern college girls practicing their French on stewards and deckhands with no intention of getting rid of their Southern drawl. The voyage lasted nearly two weeks. The men slept in the hold while the women and children had tiny cabins.
We got off the train in the Gare Saint-Lazare and went to the apartment Kaplan had rented for us (H. J. Kaplan, of Newark, N.J.). The Guggenheim grant amounted to five or six thousand dollars but the rate of exchange was five hundred and fifty to one. We were rather well-to-do.
I had brought several hundred pages of manuscript with me. This third book of mine was even more depressing than the first two. Two men in a hospital room, one dying, the other trying to keep him from surrendering to death.
O.K., the Americans had liberated Paris, now it was time for Paris to do something for me. The city lay under a black depression. The year, if I haven’t said so before, was 1948. The gloom everywhere was heavy and vile. The Seine looked and smelled like some medical mixture. Bread and coal were still being rationed. The French hated us. I had a Jewish explanation for this: bad conscience. Not only had they been overrun by the Germans in three weeks, but they had collaborated. Vichy had made them cynical. They pretended that there was a vast underground throughout the war, but the fact seemed to be that they had spent the war years scrounging for food in the countryside. And these fuckers were also patriots. La France had been humiliated and it was all the fault of their liberators, the Brits and the G.I.s.
Depressed like everybody else, I went around looking for traces of the old Paris of Balzac, et cetera. But Balzac had been pre-nihilistic. Of course, there was something in me perhaps of Jewish origin which had nothing at all to do with nihilism. But, if I wasn’t nihilistic, I was terribly downcast and writing about a hospital room, and coaxing a dying man to assert himself and claim his share of life, and thinking my gloomy thoughts beside the medicinal Seine and getting no relief from the great monuments of Paris, I sometimes wondered whether I shouldn’t be thinking about a very different course of life. Maybe I should apprentice myself to an undertaker.
Apart from Kaplan, I had no friends here. Kaplan, a French-speaking Francophile, was a writer with a job at unesco. We were never able to say anything that mattered to each other. I used to see Jimmy Baldwin quite often, mostly at mealtimes, and I had other acquaintances as well, Herb Gold [Herbert Gold, the American writer], a bohemian comedian named Lionel Abel, and the Italian philosopher Chiaromonte, whom I had known in New York. My general impression was that Europe was defying me to do something about it, and I was deeply depressed. I seem to have been a good solid sufferer in my youth.
We arrived in the fall and when spring came I was deep in the dumps. I worked in a small studio, and as I was walking toward it one morning to wrestle yet again with death in a Chicago hospital room, I made the odd discovery that the streets of Paris were offering me some sort of relief. Parisian gutters are flushed every morning by municipal employees who open the hydrants a bit and let water run along the curbs. I seem to remember there were also rolls of burlap that were meant to keep the flow from the middle of the street. Well, there was a touch of sun in the water that strangely cheered me. I suppose a psychiatrist would say that this was some kind of hydrotherapy—the flowing water, freeing me from the caked burden of depression that had formed on my soul. But it wasn’t so much the water flow as the sunny iridescence. Just the sort of thing that makes us loonies cheerful. I remember saying to myself, “Well, why not take a short break and have at least as much freedom of movement as this running water.” My first thought was that I must get rid of the hospital novel—it was poisoning my life. And next I recognized that this was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant. This bitterness of mine was intolerable, it was disgraceful, a symptom of slavery. I think I’ve always been inclined to accept the depressions that overtook me and I felt just now that I had allowed myself to be dominated by the atmosphere of misery or surliness, that I had agreed somehow to be shut in or bottled up. I seem then to have gone back to childhood in my thoughts and remembered a pal of mine whose surname was August—a handsome, breezy, freewheeling kid who used to yell out when we were playing checkers, “I got a scheme!” He lived in the adjoining building and we used to try to have telephone conversations with tin cans connected by waxed grocery string. His father had deserted the family, his mother was, even to a nine-year-old kid, visibly abnormal, he had a strong and handsome older brother. There was a younger child who was retarded—a case of Down syndrome, perhaps—and they had a granny who ran the show. (She was not really the granny; she’d perhaps been placed there by a social agency that had some program for getting old people to take charge of broken families.) Now, just what had happened to handsome, cheerful Chuckie and to his brothers, his mother, and the stranger whom they called granny? I hadn’t seen anything of these people for three decades and hadn’t a clue. So I decided to describe their lives. This came on me in a tremendous jump. Subject and language appeared at the same moment. The language was immediately present—I can’t say how it happened, but I was suddenly enriched with words and phrases. The gloom went out of me and I found myself with magical suddenness writing a first paragraph.
I was too busy and happy to make any diagnoses or to look for causes and effects. I had the triumphant feeling that this is what I had been born for. I pushed the hospital manuscript aside and began immediately to write in a spirit of reunion with the kid who had shouted, “I got a scheme!” It poured out of me. I was writing many hours every day. In the next two years I seldom looked into Fowler’s “Modern English Usage.”
Perhaps I should also add that it has been a lifelong pattern with me to come back to strength from a position of extreme weakness: I had been almost suffocated and then found that I was breathing more deeply than ever.
It was enormously exhilarating to take liberties with the language. I said what I pleased and I didn’t hesitate to generalize wildly and to invoke and dismiss epochs and worlds. For the first time I felt that the language was mine to do with as I wished.
In writing “Augie March,” I was trying to do justice to my imagination of things. I can’t actually remember my motives clearly, but I seem to have been reacting against confinement in a sardine can and evidently felt I had failed to cope with some inner demands. Reading passages from “Augie,” I seem to recognize some impulse to cover more ground, to deal with hundreds if not thousands of combined impressions. To my cold octogenarian eye, it seems overblown now, but I recognize nevertheless that I was out to satisfy an irrepressible hunger for detail. The restraint of the first two books had driven me mad—I hadn’t become a writer to tread the straight and narrow. I had been storing up stuff for years and this was my dream opportunity for getting it all out. I was also up to my eyes in mental debt. By this I mean that in becoming a writer I hoped to bring out somehow my singular reactions to existence. Why else write? I had prepared and overprepared myself by reading, study, and fact-storage or idea-storage and I was now trying to discharge all this freight. Paris (Europe) may have set me off. I didn’t actually understand what had happened during the Second World War until I had left the U.S.A. I now seem to have been struck by the shame of having written my first book under Marxist influence. In 1939, I had seen the Second World War as a capitalist imperialist war, like the First World War. My Partisan Review Leninist friends (especially Clem Greenberg [Clement Greenberg, the art critic]) had sold me on this. Even in writing “The Victim” I had not yet begun to understand what had happened to the Jews in the Second World War. Much of “Augie” was for me the natural history of the Jews in America. The Jews in Germany, Poland, Hungary, French Jews, Italian Jews had been deported, shot, gassed. I must have had them in mind in the late forties, when I wrote “Augie.”
We the children of immigrants had lots of languages to speak and we spoke them with relish. We were prepared, braced, to answer questions in half a dozen tongues. The older children had not yet forgotten their Russian, and everybody spoke Yiddish. At the age of three, I was sent to Mr. Stein across the way to learn Hebrew. I was not aware as yet that languages existed. But I soon learned that in the beginning God created heaven and earth out of Tohu v’vohu. In Genesis 11, He decided that He did not want all of mankind to speak a single language, it was too dangerous. “Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” Rabbi Stein was our neighbor on St. Dominique Street, Montreal. When the lesson was over, I went down and sat on the curbstone to think it over.
The French-Canadian kids as they marched by twos to their classes shouted obscenities and insults at us, and I soon understood that I was a Zhwiff—a muzhi (maudit) Zhwiff at that. At six, I was enrolled in the first grade at the Devonshire School. There we sang “God Save the King” and recited the Lord’s Prayer. On the way home we stopped on Roy Street to look at the Chinese in their laundry. They wore black pajamas and skullcaps as they painted their crimson labels with India ink. There was not a chance in the world that we would ever understand what they were writing or saying.
In 1924, we moved to Chicago and there we lived among Poles and Ukrainians. Everybody spoke a sort of English, and we learned certain key words, like piva—Polish for beer. Or dupa, backsides, or kapusta, pickled cabbage. On Division Street, the main drag, men carried office typewriters—we called them uprights—in their arms and for twenty-five cents the scribe would mount this machine on a ledge and write letters to parents or sisters in the Old Country.
The larger community was of course American and at school you were told in textbooks and by teachers that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were your Presidents. You could not be excluded when the common language became your language—when you knew the National League standings, when you had learned about the Chicago gang wars. In the papers, you followed the events leading to the killing of Dion O’Banion, of the Northside bootlegging gang, and of the indictment of Al Capone for tax evasion. You knew all the facts about the death of Lingle, the Tribune’s gang reporter, who was shot down in the Illinois Central Randolph Street tunnel. The papers informed you that Big Bill Thompson, the mayor, was in the pocket of Capone. All this was available in the dailies, when you had become familiar with the language of the historians, chroniclers, and the lingo of the insiders. You didn’t know the full story from sober, reliable, dependable sources. You had come to know it by mastering the language in which it was gussied up by newspapers and by magazines like Ballyhoo, College Humor, and Henry Luce’s Time.
Chicago was big on gab in the twenties and thirties, and under the influence of gab you came to feel yourself an insider. Verbal swagger was a limited art cultivated in the Hearst papers by contributors like O. O. McIntyre and Ted Cook. On a higher level was H. L. Mencken, of The American Mercury. Mencken comically expressed the dissatisfaction of intellectuals with the philistinism and comical bourgeois provinciality of the “booboisie” American in the years of prosperity that followed the First World War. He found his largest public among schoolboys like me or village atheists and campus radicals. It seemed to me that he didn’t expect his prejudices to be taken very seriously.
At school, we, the sons and daughters of European immigrants, were taught to write grammatically. Knowing the rules filled you with pride. I deeply felt the constraints of “correct” English. It wasn’t always easy, but we kept at it conscientiously, and in my twenties I published two decently written books. In 1948, I went to Paris to write a third novel. But by the winter of 1949 it became miserably—hatefully—apparent that I was once again on the wrong track. I fell into a depression thicker than the palpable soddenness of Paris. In those early postwar days, the city defeated and recently occupied by the Germans was experiencing a second and even more disgraceful occupation by the dollar-proud Americans, moronically happy, stupid and mal élevés. But the French were not more unhappy than I was when I began to recognize the extent of my latest failure. I had come to great humanistic Paris to reach what was deepest in my nature and the best I was able to do was to begin to realize the scope of my failure. Proud of my freedom, I turned out to be the least free of all the people I met. Every morning when I walked to my rented workroom I stopped to watch the municipal workers who turned on the water for the daily street wash. In the streets there was just slope enough to sluice the gutters, and watching the flow of water between the curb and the barrier of wet burlap gave me the only ease I was getting on those gray days, and the release that came with this was inexplicably verbal in form. I was not much interested in explaining this transfer from fluidity and low sparkle to . . . well, to polyglot versatility. I discovered that I could write whatever I wished, and that what I wished was to get into words the appearance of a gallery of personalities—characters like Grandma Lausch or Einhorn the fertile cripple, or Augie March himself. Years of notation ended in the discovery of a language that made everything available. A language might be restrictive or it might be expansive. An excess of corrections caused shrinking. Philip Roth puts it well when he speaks of the teeming, dazzling “specifics” in the opening pages of “Augie March.” These specifics were not deliberately accumulated for some future release. They were revealed by the language. They represent the success of an unconscious strategy. You might put it that Mr. Einhorn had been in hock for years; for decades. He and I together had been waiting for an appropriate language. By that language and only that language could he be redeemed. I couldn’t have been aware of this development. It was not an invention; it was a discovery.
The novel I now began to write wrote itself: “I am an American, Chicago-born.” The narrator was a boyhood friend whom I had lost track of thirty years ago, when my family had moved from Augusta Street. I often wondered what had become of this handsome impulsive kid. The book I found myself writing was therefore a speculative biography.
There was something deeply unsatisfactory about the language used by contemporary writers—it was stingy and arid, it was not connected with anything characteristic, permanent, durable, habitual in the writer’s outlook. For as long as I could remember I identified body and limbs, faces and their features, with words, phrases, and tones of voice. Language, thought, belief were connected somehow with noses, eyes, brows, mouths, hair—legs, hands, feet had their counterparts in language. The voice—the voices—were not invented. And whether they knew it or not all human creatures had voices and ears and vocabularies—sometimes parsimonious, sometimes limitless and overflowing. In this way the words and the phenomena were interrelated. And this was what it meant to be a writer.
Before I forget the name of the man who trained the eagle: he was an American called Mannix who had materialized in Taxco. [Chapter XVI of “Augie March” is about the attempt by Thea Fenchel, Augie’s lover, to train an eagle to attack and capture the large lizards inhabiting the mountains of central Mexico.] My memory works by fits and starts and I didn’t want to have to grope through my head in vain. The late Mannix, no longer among us, was one of those American eccentrics who do great and also grotesque things and arrange somehow a wonderful press for themselves.
As so often, I begin with a footnote.
Day in, day out, I watched Mannix and his eagle on a sharp slope outside the town. But I think I should go back a bit and explain what I was doing in Mexico in the summer of 1940. My late mother had paid twenty-five cents a week to an insurance agent, a stout man who used to come by regularly to collect his money. He carried a very thick black portfolio secured with many rubber bands. He was a bookish type himself, and was forever trying to engage me in conversation about the books he saw in my mother’s kitchen. He was extremely keen to discuss “The Decline of the West.” Smart Jewish schoolboys in Chicago were poring over Spengler at night. But, to keep to the point, I was the beneficiary of an insurance policy on which my mother paid two bits weekly. She died when I was seventeen and the policy matured eight years later. My father wanted me to turn the money over to him, all five hundred bucks of it. He needed it badly, but I refused to part with it. Now, my father was a tyrant with a perfectly good claim to be one of the all-time gallery of great tyrants. Three years earlier I had defied him by getting married. Now I declared that Anita and I would go to Mexico. It was essential that we should go. Europe was out of the question since the Germans had just overrun Paris. Deprived of Paris, I simply had to go to Mexico. Looking back, I see more agony than boldness in this decision. I was, as kids were to say later, making a statement. I had spent most of my life in weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Chicago and I needed barbarism, color, glamour, and risk. So Anita and I took the Greyhound bus to New York. I can’t remember why we didn’t go directly to Texas, but there was some compelling reason to go to New York. Perhaps I needed to see my uncle, Willie Bellow, a brushmaker, unemployed and brooding his life away in Brownsville. I didn’t clearly understand at the time, but it is easy today for me to see that he had been punished by my grandfather for joining the Bund at an early age. The Bellows did not work with their hands, they were not tradespeople, and to apprentice Willie to a brushmaker was meant to be especially humiliating and punitive because he would be working with hog bristles. It seems that in my rebellion I turned to him for support. He was an affectionate uncle, but he was an unemployed worker with a family to feed. I ought to have shared the five hundred bucks with him. I was however headed for Mexico. We went by Greyhound by way of Augusta, Georgia, where my Uncle Max was selling schmattes on the installment plan to black field hands. Our next stop was New Orleans. After hanging around the Latin Quarter pointlessly for a few days, we went on to Mexico City.
Now, Mexico in those years was everything that D. H. Lawrence said it was, and a good deal more besides. Here there were no uncles, no family bonds. I was somewhat frightened, I must admit, but certainly not intimidated. It seems to me now that I was determined not to be made by my father in Chicago, nor by my older brothers. Uncle Willie in Brownsville illustrated what might happen to a Bellow who rebelled. He would be humiliatingly shot down. Uncle Max in Georgia was a cheerful, engaging hand-to-mouth ganef. And now here I was in Mexico to stay as long as my four hundred and fifty dollars lasted. After drifting around for several weeks in places like Michoacán, we were drawn to Taxco, which had a sizable foreign colony, mostly American, but also Japanese, Dutch, and British.
I had been brought up to worry, but the lesson seems somehow not to have taken. None of the people I met in Taxco had a very firm grip on anything at all. I never gave a thought to what would happen after my money had run out. We rented a very nice house with two servants for about ten bucks a week and the Indian women shopped, cooked, and washed our clothes. I have to say also that I very rarely gave my father a thought. I was very happy to submit to the influence of my betters. I was intrigued with what I took to be the imaginative powers of the people I met. I see all too clearly now how limited they were, but everybody has his own pattern for liberation and my own liberation took the form of an escape from anxiety. My mood was investigative. I wanted to see firsthand what the characters I was spending my time with were up to. I sent my wife away to Acapulco—then a beach with a few huts. My strong desire was to go it alone. It never occurred to me that it might be a danger to Anita to be shipped off. Evidently I discovered a talent for doing things in a headlong style. Perhaps I was fascinated by Mannix’s eagle because he was such a plunger.
The challenge was to emerge intact from the grip of these would-be dominators. To extract the secret of their powers from them while eluding their control became my singular interest. If I had any game it was this independence game. Perhaps it was not so much an interest as it was a spiritual exercise. I recognized that I did not have to do the will of others.
In Paris, where the book was being written, it was Charlie (Augie) who resisted influence and control. Childish and fresh, he sat at the checkerboard and shouted “I got a scheme!” I, the writer, might be hampered, depressed. Charlie, however, was immune, defying Grandma Lausch. She took a dim view of his schemes. He, however, was prepared to light out for the territory ahead.
In mountainous Mexico, where the sun shone so dramatically, so explicitly, you were never allowed to forget death. Women bought tiny coffins in the marketplace for their dead infants and carried them on their heads to the cemetery. After ten years, graves were dug up and bones thrown into a charnel house. The Day of Death was a national holiday. Although I was most keenly aware of this, I was too highly excited for any sense of fear to take a grip on me. And then the eagle was a death-dealing life force. Seven mornings a week I was out with Mannix. I also drank far more than was good for me with American buddies in the zócalo (the town square). I took riding lessons and I hung out with the hard-drinking professionals who wrote for Black Mask and other pulps. Mannix and his eagle were my antidotes to the low company of the pulp writers. It was hard for me to grasp the fact that the free could be taught to hawk. It surprised me to learn that such a predator would obey his trainer like any lesser creature. I felt a boundless respect for the eagle nevertheless. Mannix I saw as just another showman. Later, when “Augie” was published, Mannix demanded billing in his own name and Viking Press advised me to give him a footnote. I can’t recall whether this was mentioned in the text, but the eagle perched atop the water tank in Mannix’s toilet, just under the ceiling. Just another domestic fowl. On the mountainside a creature of boundless freedom and power, he caught lizards and brought them to his showman master.
Robert Penn Warren once said that he liked to write in a foreign country “where the language is not your own and you are forced into yourself in a special way.” I suppose it is essential that one should be forced into oneself and perhaps the foreign language is important—perhaps not. Plausible speculation, after the fact, can be pleasant. When I began to write “The Adventures of Augie March,” I was living in Paris and I now ask myself whether I was at that time forced into myself in a special way and find that I am able to answer in the affirmative. It seems to me that I felt very much as I had felt in 1923, when we, the family, were reunited with my father and his cousins in Chicago. My father, who had preceded us a year earlier, and Cousin Louie were waiting for us at the Harrison Street Station when the Montreal train arrived. The date was July 4th, Independence Day. The brick streets were hot. In the Midwest, everything was alien—nature itself was different—the air, the leaves and bushes, the soil, the water, the very molecules were unfamiliar. Breathing would not be here what it had been in Canada. My father, whom I had longed to see, was now clean-shaven. I had never seen him without his mustache, and the bareness of his upper lip was a shock to me.
In the street near the platform, Cousin Louie’s Dodge touring car was parked. Its celluloid panels were kept unbuttoned so that the air could circulate. Sitting at the wheel, Louie wore his hair in a long crest, like an Iroquois warrior. He belonged, physically, to a different branch of the species. He had a big thriving nose and a ruddy color. Louie had saved us, and brought us to the promised land.
We followed the trolley lines up Milwaukee Avenue to the northwest side of the city, and since this was July 4th the streetcars set off the powder caps the children had taped to the rails, and in this ripping noise and smoke we drove to Cousin Flora’s house. Flora, Louie’s sister, welcomed us into her bungalow and fed us on smoked Great Lakes whitefish. We had come by coach, sitting up all night, and were very tired. So the living-room furniture was pushed aside and we slept on the floor. The Chicago neighborhood was raw and new. The streets had just been paved and along the Sanitary District canals the newly planted trees were coming into meagre leaf. Orange striped awnings shaded the windows. Old Montreal lay one sleepless night behind us. Chicago with its stars and stripes was utterly new. Rummaging in Cousin Flora’s closets I found a coverless prose translation of the Iliad (Andrew Lang, Leaf and Myers). Achilles and Agamemnon therefore stood between me and the Chicago of Al Capone and Big Bill Thompson. It was up to me to find ways to reconcile the Trojan War with Prohibition, major-league baseball, and the Old Country as my mother remembered it. After school, in the cellar of the synagogue on Rockwell, I studied Old Testament Hebrew. At home I followed the Leopold and Loeb case in the papers. In 1926, there was the Dempsey-Tunney fight, and Charlie Chaplin’s “Gold Rush.” By 1930, I was an American entirely. I read The American Mercury, the novels of Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson.
I shall never understand how “The Adventures of Augie March” came to be written. I had arrived in Paris with wife and child to complete another novel—something about two men who shared a hospital room in Chicago and came to be close friends. The story was told by the survivor. I said to myself that I ought not to be writing such dreary stuff. What I needed was something more open and generous—a freewheeling, hang-loose book. But I was unable to shake off the hospital room and the dying man who had become my close friend. I was desperately depressed.
I had rented a room near the Place Saint-Sulpice, where the shops sold ecclesiastical goods, and I was walking heavyhearted toward my workplace one morning when I caught up with the cleaning crew who opened the taps at the street corners and let the water run along the curbs, flushing away the cigarette butts, dogs’ caca, shredded letters, orange skins, candy wrappers into the large-mouthed sewers. The sanitation sweepers dragged the soaking burlap downhill to keep the water from dispersing. Watching the flow, I felt less lame, and I was grateful for this hydrotherapy and the points of sunlight in it—nothing simpler. I did not have to kill myself in the service of art.
That “Augie March” happened in dismal postwar Europe (knowledge of the Holocaust was slowly coming to us back then) is evidence of an independent move of the mind, a decision not to surrender to horror. I discovered that I no longer wanted to be put upon by art seriousness.
My oldest brother was a lesson to me in this respect. He was determined to become a world-beater. He did, as a matter of fact, very well for himself. He became very rich. From the first he would say to me, when we moved from Canada, enough of this old crap about being Jewish. Also, my old man was oddly enough a great American patriot. He had no picture of himself as a man beating America, but my brother did. My middle brother, Sam, was also a successful businessman, and he was certainly American in hatching deals and multiplying bank accounts. But he was of the Old World with his wife and children, and granddaughters who had to be married off. There were no such compromises for Morris, the entirely American brother. We were united in our disapproval of brother Sam and his formal orthodoxy.
Paris was turning out to be a mistake. “Living up to it” consumed too much energy. Madame Lemelle, my landlady, told me that André Gide lived just down the way and if I had answered I would have said that competition was actually good for business. In any case, Mme. Lemelle was more interested in the automatic water heater I had bought and installed in her kitchen. This might have been the right kind of American gesture to make. But my real interests just then were not in the technological transformation (improvement) of Europe by America.
I had walked away from the street-washing crew saying under my breath, “I am an American—Chicago-born.” The “I” in this case was not autobiographical. I had in mind a boyhood friend from Augusta Street in Chicago of the mid-twenties. I hadn’t seen Augie since the late twenties; the forties were now ending. What had become of my friend, I couldn’t say. It struck me that a fictional biography of this impulsive, handsome, intelligent, spirited boy would certainly be worth writing. Augie had introduced me to the American language and the charm of that language was one of the charms of his personality. From him I had unwittingly learned to go at things freestyle, making the record in my own way—first to knock, first admitted.
Of course, I improvised freely from the events of my own life. Immigrants differed considerably in their attitudes toward America. Some continued to live mentally and emotionally in the Old Country. Others “Americanized” themselves. To Jews from other parts of the country, the Eastern Seaboard Jews seemed less confidently American, more cowed by old money and old names. My father understood the U.S.A. rather well. I discovered that Cahan of the Yiddish Forward made a serious effort to educate his immigrant readers. Though he was a socialist he understood that the older Europeans had little use for Marxism. My father knew quite a lot about the Constitution, the Congress and the Presidency. I remember being lectured by him on Roger Williams’s banishment from Massachusetts Bay Colony and his hospitality to the Jews and Quakers. My old man would say that in the Old Country Jews had to carry masses of identification papers—cartes de séjour. Here you were never stopped and asked for your papers.
I had an eighth-grade teacher—Mrs. Jenkins was her name, a wonderful old woman. Her father had been a prisoner in Andersonville, and in the mid-twenties she would tell the kids his Civil War stories. Mrs. Jenkins herself was white-haired. The G.A.R. was still a lively topic in Chicago. On Memorial Day, the old men lined up on Randolph and Michigan, in front of the public library. The public library was built on land given by the Civil War veterans. On the second floor of the north end there was a war museum. People were not familiar with it. They were at the south end, where the books were. But upstairs at the north end was an enormous display of regimental flags, guns, photographs, and on Veterans Day old soldiers lined up for the annual march. The G.A.R. was still represented. I read a lot about the Civil War, Grant’s memoirs and Sherman’s as well.
I took a tiny hotel room on Rue des Saints-Pères. Across the way pneumatic drills were at work on the construction of a hospital or medical school. The room below mine was occupied by an old Italian scholar named Caffi. He was tall but frail and had an immense head of hair and a small nervous laugh, but he was a serious man. In 1917, as an Italian journalist in Petersburg, he had spent the funds his paper sent him to feed starving children. Now he lived on the money raised by his devoted followers. His supporters kept him alive and would occasionally come from Italy to visit him. Apparently he was an accomplished Greek scholar. Most of the day he passed in bed drinking coffee and writing learned notes to himself.
I tried occasionally to be helpful. As he was washing his feet in the sink one day, the bowl of the washstand broke and a chunk of it fell on the instep of the supporting right foot. The wound was painful. He wrapped a large towel around it and did not leave his bed for an entire week. Among his acquaintances and followers there were some who said he had wounded himself on purpose, from resentment toward a friend who had tried to get him a job. A strange theory. When one of his visitors remarked that I did not seem to be getting what an American should get out of Paris, M. Caffi wisely replied that it was only natural that I should be thinking of America most of the time. It was Chicago before the Depression that I went to in my room in the morning, not misty Paris with its cold statues and admirable bridges. The book had taken off, writing itself very rapidly; I was coming to be strangely independent of place. Chicago itself had grown exotic to me. A descendant of Russian-Jewish immigrants, I was writing about Chicago in odd corners of Paris and, afterward, in Austria, Italy, Long Island, and New Jersey. To speak of rootless or rooted persons is all very well, but I felt that the cultural vocabulary of the university crowd should be avoided. I listened to Mr. Caffi when he described America as the new Rome. I was deferential and respectful, aware that he was trying to do good, to raise my mental level. He did as much for his young Italian disciples—his helpers. They brewed his coffee and mothproofed his winter clothes. Half-blind and often bedridden, Caffi directed his activities. He evidently saw that I was an American doing something characteristically American—a latter-day Roman. What I learned in Europe was how deeply involved I was with the U.S.A.
A major figure in Europe was an intellectual—poverty was one of his badges and he was supported by his followers. A young Italian had attached himself to Caffi as his delegate, representative, and helper. I was fascinated by this very different un-American version of a higher life, but I pursued very different aims. Sr. Caffi probably saw this more clearly. I think also that I was very lucky. For me, the overpowering brother was the totally American brother. He overpowered me and in a sense he led me to write “The Adventures of Augie March.” He didn’t like the book when he read it, but he granted that I had in my cockeyed way done something significant and it was necessary that he should figure in the book. He was aggressive and I recognized in him the day-to-day genius of the U.S.A.
In the opening sentence of my work-in-progress I don’t say that I am an American Jew. I simply declare that I am an American. My eldest brother was the first to point out the advantages of this. America offered to free us from the control of the family and of the Jewish community. After school he was a “baggage smasher,” loading trucks with suitcases and trunks for home delivery. He wore football jerseys with broad bands of orange and purple. In a few years, he had city-hall connections. He wore a derby and a velvet collar to his topcoat, a silk scarf with polka dots, and pointed shoes of patent leather. He was slick, savvy, and combative. He was preparing for the bar exam and he described himself as bagman for a member of the House of Representatives. He opened his gladstone bag for me once and showed me paper money it was crammed with.
He brought home copies of The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Liberty Magazine, and The Literary Digest. These influential papers gave you an idealized orientation to the mental life of the country—its farmers, its laborers, its wives and mothers, its mechanics and athletes, its heroes—its promoters and opportunists, its social climbers, its White Pants Willies and marketers of drowned Florida real estate, New England boy prodigies like Mark Tidd—Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd: images of what Americans were, or might become. There was a great demand for images or models of rough-and-ready frontier types such as Walt Whitman had offered to the country in “Leaves of Grass” and “Democratic Vistas.” In a country of immigrants, there was a singular need for prototypes, especially among the young.
In my father’s generation, there was a great sense of release from tsarist officialdom, not merely oppressive but downright crazy. My father believed that the U.S.A. offered the Jews unheard-of opportunities for development—the first rational government in history. And the law of the land, guaranteed in the founding documents. My father took an exceptional interest in the U.S. Constitution and the privileges of citizenship, for which Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy had prepared him. He said, “That’s what I call a deal. I’m glad to pay taxes in a country where the Constitution says I’m a citizen, not a Jew.” This put the work of the founders under some strain, he thought, but there was no danger in this since justice as the world acknowledges was taught to Israel by Moses under the direct supervision of God. But from the beginning the life of the Jews in America was not what it had always been in Europe, with the ghettos—the Jews in each country belonging to a separate community of Jews. They were taxed not as Jews but as citizens, nor were they subject to special levies. As a Jew, you have a connection of your own to the life of the country, and in many respects you could be as American as you pleased. Naturally, there were private organizations which excluded you from membership, but such conduct would force you to remember the mass murder, gassing camps, the contrast of seriousness with sophomoric provocation.
My old man was odd that way; he was a great patriot, seeing the safety of the Jews as dependent on the stability and balance of the rational founders.
My brother’s Americanism was altogether different. He was made for Chicago. He adopted the style of a racketeer and put himself over as a wheeler-dealer. An underworld coloration made legitimate business seem or sound crooked.
And, strangely enough, my father became a patriotic American. He knew quite a lot of U.S. history, though he read only the Yiddish papers. He often took me aback. He’d say, “Tell me about this man Roger Williams.” “Where did you find that name?” I said. “I read about him in The Forward,” my father said. “There was a series of articles on Rhode Island.”
Abraham Cahan, editor of the Yiddish paper, saw to it that his readers received instruction in the rights and duties of citizenship.
Iremember that we arrived at the Dearborn Street Station in Chicago on July 4th. We were met by my father and his cousin and employer, Louie, who owned a bakery on Marshfield Avenue. A tall, vigorous man, with a red Indian strip of hair down the middle of his head. But I was truly astonished by my father—he had shaved his mustache and the nudity of his face shocked me. Among the alien phenomena of Chicago, this was, on that first day, probably the hardest to absorb. We climbed into Cousin Louie’s touring car with its flapping celluloid curtains and we followed the car tracks, on which the kids had laid small explosive devices that were set off by the trolley cars. The air smelled of gunpowder. War veterans were firing the guns they had brought home from France. I was too big a boy, at nine, to be dandled on my father’s knee, and, besides, the disappearance of his cigarette-saturated mustache had made another man of him, temporarily. Montreal was nice, it was old-fashioned, European, its parts were interconnected. The crude Chicago of those days was described by an English visitor as a string of industrial villages from factory to factory. The streets of the Polish neighborhood where we settled smelled of sauerkraut and home-brewed Prohibition beer. Mechanical player pianos everywhere played polkas and waltzes. In proletarian immigrant Chicago of the twenties there was little culture, but schoolchildren didn’t know what culture was, and I was in any case at a level of development below books, music, painting, and conversation. I found myself in a place where everything was strange—even the trees and their leaves. Colors, spaces, the air itself was different, clumsier, coarser—as if made of heavier molecules. I was now, as my parents had been earlier in Canada, an immigrant in an altogether different physical reality. Here everything demanded revision, and I was aware that my senses were being adapted to the chemical or tactile demands of the new place—its atmospheres, its hidden variations had to be absorbed.
The rest—classrooms, playgrounds, marching in the corridors—came easily. Baseball gave me a certain amount of trouble at first, because I had spent my eighth year in the hospital. [The eight-year-old Bellow was hospitalized with acute appendicitis and peritonitis that led to life-threatening complications.] I worked hard at physical fitness, but when a grounder passed one of the boys said, “You looked at that ball as if it was an object of idle curiosity.”
Pittsburgh was famous for steel, Detroit for automobiles, Akron for rubber tires, Swift and Armour exported beef and bacon from their Southside Chicago plants. Donnelly the printer published telephone directories of many cities, and in Chicago the educated classes thought of the city as a literary center. Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Edgar Lee Masters, Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay came here to study, to write for the newspapers or the ad agencies. The Chicago Journal, a paper that did not survive the Depression, published a weekly literary supplement. The two Hearst papers were hospitable to writers. High-school children also read Mencken’s American Mercury. One of the most notorious crimes of the mid-twenties was committed by Leopold and Loeb, university students whose heads were turned by the Nietzschean ideas they wildly misunderstood. They were defended by Clarence Darrow, whose courtroom speeches ran in the papers together with the gang killings and the urban sketches of Ben Hecht. In high school, at the age of fourteen, we were doing “The Merchant of Venice” and “Julius Caesar,” and, on our own, Dos Passos’s “Manhattan Transfer” and Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” We read the “Chicago authors,” of course, Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” and, a little later, Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan.” My closest friend, in early adolescence, was Syd Harris, who lived on Iowa Street, just east of Robey. An only child and a difficult one, he tyrannized his London-born mother and his Russian papa. Skinny Sydney, with his wild ways, his tics, and his rages, ran the show—he lied, he threatened, and he stormed, he played the genius and the dictator. A large dinner table occupied the little parlor and there we read our esoteric books. We wrote at opposite ends of the big table, on yellow second-sheets from the Woolworth ten-cent store. At this square borax table, its surface protected by a carpet-like cover, we wrote stories, poems, essays, dialogues, political fantasies, essays on Marxism—on subjects we didn’t really know too much about.
When well-meaning Mrs. Harris looked in on us to ask some harmless, encouraging question, Sydney would shout, “Get back to the kitchen, you old Cockney bitch. How dare you interrupt.” And, losing her temper, one eye jumping out of focus when she bristled, his mama would answer, “Yer no child of mine. They switched yer on me in the hospital.”
It was theatre, of course.
Mrs. Harris thought of me as a well-behaved boy of good family from whom he, Sydney, could learn to be civil and show proper respect. I was brought up to defer to my elders. Millennia of correct conduct, I thought, and much good they did us, I think today. But I am still shocked by Sydney’s false rages, as when he shouted at his ma, get out you old “whore.” This was pushing outrage and bohemian swagger too far. I thought, My mother wouldn’t have let me get away with it, and my father would have knocked me down.
At fifteen, we wrote a book together, and one winter day on Division Street we flipped a coin to see which of us would take the manuscript to New York City to be published. Sydney, when he won the toss, stuffed the pages under his sweater. We pooled our money—some sixty cents—and immediately he was in the street, with his thumb up. In a matter of days, he was in New York. He wrote that he was staying on Riverside with John Dos Passos, who was dazzled by Sydney’s gifts. Dos Passos had six white spitz dogs who were walked on triple leashes, twice a day.
Meantime, Mrs. Harris had reported the disappearance of her only child to the Missing Persons Bureau. She came to the house and questioned me in my mother’s sickroom. [Bellow’s mother was dying of breast cancer.] I said I knew nothing. Adolescents in those days were bound by gangland rules. You didn’t rat on a buddy. My eldest brother said that I should be questioned at police headquarters. We went to Eleventh and State Streets, Sydney’s mother weeping, my bossy brother determined to tag me hard and teach me a lesson. I repeated my lies to the Missing Persons Bureau, and felt that I could tough it out with the best of them.
But my brother now broke into my locked drawer and found Sydney’s letters. After dinner that night he read them to the family. In the opinion of the New York experts who had read our manuscript, Sydney was an obvious winner. Covici the publisher had commissioned a book on Chicago’s revolutionary youth and paid Sydney an advance of two hundred dollars. In the judgment of the publishing illuminati, I would do well to enter my father’s business. Only my mother grieved for me. Everybody else was delighted to see me go down in flames.
Famous and rich, Sydney came home on the train. He was far too busy now to write a book for Covici. He soon became the legman for Milton Mayer, who covered Chicago for P.M., the New York paper founded by Marshall Field. Eventually, Sydney became a Chicago Daily News columnist who specialized in the education of adolescents. Sydney’s early schooling in avant-garde literature was singularly advantageous. Beneath his ivory tower there was a gold mine.
Idon’t like that book, “Seize the Day.” I never think about it, I never take it up, I don’t touch it. But I have to admit that you ask the question of questions, and that I don’t know how I can possibly answer. [I’d asked him if he knew why, in writing “Seize the Day,” he’d moved from the euphoric openness of “Augie March” back into the dour ethos of the pre-“Augie” world of “The Victim” and “Dangling Man.”] Augie is the freest of the free, while Wilhelm is a full catalogue of repressions and civilized man-traps. I sympathize with Wilhelm but I don’t like him. Seated at the checkerboard, he has no scheme. The reader, however, is attracted to him because of his “sensibilities.” His is, of course, a common type—he calls on others to “give” or “encourage.” His is the commonest of stories. But my task was to represent him, not to recommend him. In him we see the failures of “feeling”—the characteristic American slackness of virtues and the inanity of good counsel.
Many readers assumed that as an enlightened person I would naturally be on Tommy Wilhelm’s side. On the contrary, I saw him as a misfit wooing his hard-nosed father with the corrupt platitudes of affection, or job-lot, bargain-sale psychological correctness. I thought he was one of these people who make themselves pitiable in order to extract your support. The clue to my true opinion about this may be found in the zany mental-health lectures of Dr. Tamkin. The absurd, phony Dr. Tamkin was a great help to me—the advice-giving phony we turn to for guidance, the false man of science who has all the answers.
I’ve thought quite a lot about the New York setting of “Seize the Day” and I’m inclined to agree that the loneliness, shabbiness, and depression of the book find a singular match in the uptown Broadway surroundings. I think that for old-time Chicagoans the New Yorkers of “Seize the Day” are emotionally thinner, or one-dimensional. We had fuller or, if you prefer, richer emotions in the Middle West. I think I congratulated myself on having been able to deal with New York, but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.
I lived on the Upper West Side for some time. Adam’s mother, Sondra, lived in the Ansonia before we were married, and I used to spend my nights there. That was in the early fifties, and that hotel lent itself to “Seize the Day”—the Insomnia, I liked to call it.
I found a nice apartment on Riverside Drive. But somehow it just didn’t work. I never knew any real comfort in New York. I always felt challenge and injury around the corner. I had always considered it a very risky place, where one was easily lost. And I think I saw New York through the being of Isaac Rosenfeld. [Rosenfeld, a fiction writer and essayist, was a Chicago native and had been a friend of Bellow’s since childhood.] He came to take the town and he got took. From his standpoint it proved to be a very dangerous place. He came with this pretty wife to qualify for his Ph.D. He came from Chicago and he got himself deeper and deeper into the pit.
Isaac would almost certainly have agreed that New York might save him. Chicago had no hope to extend to him. The just married pair, Isaac and his Greek-American bride, found a flat in Greenwich Village. His “carefree” circus on Barrow Street attracted the bohemian intellectual crowd. Isaac became one of the wits of this group, a serious person who allowed himself to play the clown following the example of the Dostoyevskian underground man. During the war, he was in command of a barge in the New York Harbor. An ingenious, playful father, he filled the apartment with cats, dogs, guinea pigs, parakeets with whom the two kids were on excellent terms. The son, like Isaac himself, died of a heart attack in his mid-thirties. The daughter is now a Buddhist nun and resides in a French convent. Isaac’s wife remarried when she was widowed and in her late eighties lives on in Honolulu. She’s partially paralyzed. His considerable gifts as a writer never matured in New York. He became a follower of the onetime Freudian Wilhelm Reich. This would not have been possible in any other American city. It took Isaac years to cast off the Reichian influence. This ideological ordeal, one might say, followed him from Vienna to New York.
Also, New York was the place where I did the Reichian therapy. That was really a horror. I didn’t realize how terrible it was, and that it happened under Isaac’s influence. Because he insisted that I had to have this done, since he was doing it. About three years. Once or twice a week. There was a box in the doctor’s office and you had to take off every stitch and lie on the couch. I think I probably was doing this during that “Seize the Day” period. Not anything I’m terribly proud of, but you could not keep your respect for yourself if you had not faced the ultimate rigors. And it was a link between Isaac and me. I felt that I could not let him go through this without going through it myself so that I would know what was happening to him.
I suppose I felt utterly isolated in New York. It was the sort of place that generated such feelings, and there was nothing you could turn to. I mean, if you turn to somebody for help you’d make the biggest mistake in your life if you choose Dr. Tamkin. I knew the original of Dr. Tamkin. He was a friend of two friends. The second friends were a European couple whom I liked very much, and their only child had been killed in an accident and “Dr. Tamkin” came and took charge, emotional charge, of the family, as he would. And I hated him for it. I saw what he was doing; he had no feeling for these people. He was just a scatterbrain, a poseur. Self-anointed helper of mankind, full of generosity to everybody. That was the real background of this foolish grotesque. She was a Jewish Frenchwoman. He was a German Jew. Their child, about fifteen years old, was knocked down in the street by a truck on his way home from school. She went to the hospital, where she was told that he was O.K. Then he had an embolism, as a result of this accident. And when she got home from the hospital the phone was ringing to tell them that he was dead. They had just lost their son whom they loved with all their hearts and he put himself forward as their protector and their guide, with all this psychological garbage of his.
It was a very bad time. Maybe what I was thinking is if you bring your hopes to New York this inevitably happens to you. There’s a connection between Tommy Wilhelm and Isaac. Because he does come to New York again, to reëstablish his connection with his father and his mother, his grave, and so on.
Still, having said all this, I can’t really see that I am so utterly place-dependent. I’ve never taken much stock in the notion that London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and other great capitals have made the literature of their respective countries. The cities are wonderful, but one must be wary of historicism. Historicism is an academic product whose premise is that urban multitudes make the culture of their countries. Together we share the high significance or glamour of Paris and London. During the Depression, I bought a set of Balzac and was taken over by the glamour of the great joint enterprise of the city of Paris and its triumphant capitalism, its erotic oddities and vices, the mixed legacy of its Revolution, its Napoleonic days of triumph, its jeune ambitieux, its inventive restless criminals, its bankers, its lovers. This wonderful mixture or compound had a glamour of its own. We wanted to know all that could be known about it.
Its attractions are boundless, but is it everything it claims to be? We are fascinated by it, but we are also wary of its claims to be the setting of settings and the formative power behind the phenomena. We had learned in our Chicagos and New Yorks that the great treasures of culture were not indispensable—that one can live without it.
It may be that the swing from “Augie” to “Seize the Day” was part of a lifelong pattern. It seems to have started when I was a kid in Montreal, dying in the hospital; when I was released from the Royal Victoria Hospital, we went immediately to Chicago. There I grew up, worshipped health, became muscular and chinned myself, and so forth. I was making it, emotionally, in Chicago. After that, when I got out of college and went to New York, it was more of the same. But I had an Uncle Willie Bellow, in Brownsville, who was a very gentle, depressed man. He was a brushmaker. He disappointed his father, my grandfather. My grandfather apprenticed him to a brushmaker. This apprenticeship contained a hidden disgrace, because as a brushmaker he would have to deal with hog’s bristles. This was actually my grandfather’s point. So there was poor Willie, an illegal immigrant in New York. I don’t know how he ever got there—he took a train with his family from Montreal to New York, but there was no record of his entry into the country, so he couldn’t apply for citizenship papers. I loved him dearly. He was a very very feeling, cheerful, generous humorist, without much power of self-expression. And he died in the early fifties in his place of work, at the brush factory, in Brooklyn. It’s true, many dark things were happening as I came to write “Seize the Day.”
“As much a disease as he is a man” perfectly sums up “Henderson the Rain King.” [Bellow is alluding to a description of Henderson I’d used in my question.] Henderson is of course looking for a cure. But the bourgeois is defined by his dread of death. All we need to know about sickness as it relates to bourgeois amour propre and death we can learn from Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” The difficulty in approaching Henderson following this outlook is that Henderson is so unlike a bourgeois. In his case, the categories wither away.
It seems to me that I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote “The Rain King.” I was looking for my idea to reveal itself as I investigated the phenomena—the primary phenomenon being Henderson himself, and it presently became clear to me that America has no idea—not the remotest—of what America is. Europeans would agree, enthusiastically, with this finding. They will tell you that America is inculte or nyekulturny. But how far does that get us? It is true that culture is not one of Henderson’s direct concerns. He could not compete with his father’s gentlemanly generation—his immediate ancestors who knew Homer and read Dante in Italian. He had a very different take on American life. You refer to this, rightly, as his wacky anthropology. To a young Chicagoan it seemed the science of sciences. I learned that what was right among the African Masai was wrong with the Eskimos. Later I saw that this was a treacherous doctrine—morality should be made of sterner stuff. But in my youth my head was turned by the study of erratic—or goofy—customs. In my early twenties I was a cultural relativist. I had given all of that up before I began to write “Henderson.”
Roth likes “Henderson,” and I am grateful to him for that. He sees it as a screwball stunt, but he sees, too, that the stunt is sincere and the book has great screwball authority. I was much criticized by reviewers for yielding to anarchic or mad impulses and abandoning urban settings and Jewish themes. But I continue to insist that my subject ultimately was America. Its oddities were not accidental but substantial. Again, Roth puts it better than I could have done. Henderson is that “undirected human force whose raging insistence miraculously does get through.” The wacky Henderson led me through my last and wackiest course in anthropology. My diploma, if I had been given one, would have told the world that I was a graduate of the college of dionysiacs. Did I know what I was doing? Not very clearly. My objective was to “burst the spirit’s sleep.” Readers would share this—or they would not. Alfred Kazin asked what Jews could possibly know about American millionaires. For my purposes, I felt that I knew enough. Chanler Chapman, the son of the famous John Jay Chapman, was the original of Eugene Henderson—the tragic or near-tragic comedian and the buffoon heir of a great name. I can’t imagine what I saw in him or why it was that I was so goofily drawn to him. Those years were the grimmest years of my life. My father had died, a nephew in the Army had committed suicide. My wife had left me, depriving me also of my infant son. I had sunk my small legacy into a collapsing Hudson River mansion. For the tenth time I went back to page 1, beginning yet another version of “Henderson.” ♦
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